Science distilled in a phrase

“Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases.”—John Wilbanks, Creative Commons.

“Frequently, the way to understand a complicated system is to understand its component parts, but that’s probably not the case for the most interesting complicated systems—like us.”—Robert Sapolsky, Stanford University.

Seed magazine asked leading scientists to summarize the most important lesson to be drawn from their field of study in a single sentence. See what they said here.